Problem: In Commons, I often encounter very deep sub-categories, which are valid and should exist, but still only contain very few files. Browsing the content in these categories is difficult because you have to open each specific subcategory to get the preview of just one or two files.
Examples:17th c. maps of Hesse which has in total 35 files over 14 sub-categories. Or Lviv in 19th c., with about 200(?) files in about 50(?) sub-sub-sub-categories (can't count exact numbers here, some categories and files show up in different branches). Problem has come up in this talk recently, between me and User Nosferattus.
Proposed solution: A clickable button "show all content over all sub-categories" that allows the user to open a new window/tab which then shows all files within such sparsely populated categories and their sub-categories.
technical suggestions I can already think of myself:
Exclude recursions and duplicates from showing up several times, of course.
Possibly with a marker from which category the files come from. Possibly duplicate files as per the above point, could receive several markers.
The proposed tool is NOT helpful in the case of heavily populated categories. It should not show up if the parent-category has more than X files, and exclude all childnode-categories that go over that same threshold. If too many files would need to be displayed, a warning should come up, or the button should be greyed out, or not be displayed at all. X could be a comparatively low number like 100, or 200.
I figure that fetching all sub-cat content and displaying it "temporarily" in the parent-category window for the user, would mess with tools like Cat-a-lot, which is why I propose a new display window. This one should only display the files, possibly the corresponding markers mentioned above, and a backlink to the actual category.
Who would benefit: Users browsing Commons content via categories, including the Categorizers.
